Products · Product
CSV
Raised as a usability problem by 15 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2014–2026), in 17 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
CSV delimiters, escapes and encodings vary, causing error-prone handlingUnreviewed
20142026- CSV-based systems need painful manual intervention and waste people's time and attention2025-03-27
- CSV data transfer format is painful to work with for database interop2024-10-07
- Locale-dependent semicolon separator breaks CSV files when opened elsewhere2024-06-23
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 17 complaints
- Users editing CSV in text editors break files that the editor doesn't validate2026-04-20
- Hand edits in text editors silently break files, and field types are unclear2025-08-09
- CSV-based systems need painful manual intervention and waste people's time and attention2025-03-27
- Large CSVs freeze or crash tools and are painful to search, sort and join2025-02-23
- CSV data transfer format is painful to work with for database interop2024-10-07
- Non-technical users must convert CSV files through LibreOffice before Excel can open them2024-08-02
- Locale-dependent semicolon separator breaks CSV files when opened elsewhere2024-06-23
- No way to specify field types, so data is ambiguous and gets misread2024-03-26
- Exported CSV uses commas or semicolons unpredictably, so importers misread the data2024-03-26
- Parsers can silently corrupt data, so every file needs manual checking and repair2022-07-07
- Locale-dependent commas make numbers ambiguous, so users must guess separators and risk data loss2022-05-04
- CSV's varying delimiters, escapes and encodings cause painful, error-prone handling2019-08-22
- Non-technical users can't import CSV files properly, so everything lands in one column2017-10-10
- Strict parser fails entirely on stray quotes, blocking use until data is manually fixed2017-06-11
- Unescaped rows break parsing and are hard to isolate among billions of rows2017-03-10
- People hand-write CSV without doubling quotes, so files come out malformed and need cleanup2015-02-22
- Spaces between separators are illegal, which is unintuitive for users2014-03-26